Scandal (short story)

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"Scandal" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in Century in 1919. [1]

Willa Cather American writer and novelist

Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.

<i>The Century Magazine</i> US publication 1880s-1930s

The Century Magazine was first published in the United States in 1881 by The Century Company of New York City, which had been bought in that year by Roswell Smith and renamed by him after the Century Association. It was the successor of Scribner's Monthly Magazine and ceased publication in 1930.

Contents

Plot summary

Kitty Ayrshire, an opera singer, suffers from a cold, thus preventing her from singing. Bored, she asks her friend Pierce Tevis to visit her. Together they talk about the gossip that has been circulating about her. Tevis explains that Siegmund Stein, a wealthy manufacturer, has been going out about town with a woman who resembles Kitty; everyone thinks it is her. Kitty then interrupts him and recounts how while at a party at the Steins's, she had to use her lover Peppo to excuse her from her persistent hosts. A few weeks later however, her picture with both Siegmund Stein and his new wife was in the papers.

Characters

Allusions to other works

Kitty Ayrshire also appears in A Gold Slipper .

Literary criticism and significance

Although Scandal was written in 1916 while she was in Denver, [2] it was only published in 1919. [1] It has been argued that this is due to its antisemitism. [1]

Denver State capital and consolidated city-county in Colorado, United States

Denver, officially the City and County of Denver, is the capital and most populous municipality of the U.S. state of Colorado. Denver is located in the South Platte River Valley on the western edge of the High Plains just east of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. The Denver downtown district is immediately east of the confluence of Cherry Creek with the South Platte River, approximately 12 mi (19 km) east of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Denver is named after James W. Denver, a governor of the Kansas Territory, and it is nicknamed the Mile High City because its official elevation is exactly one mile above sea level. The 105th meridian west of Greenwich, the longitudinal reference for the Mountain Time Zone, passes directly through Denver Union Station.

Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is generally considered to be a form of racism. It has also been characterized as a political ideology which serves as an organizing principle and unites disparate groups which are opposed to liberalism.

The story was a favorite of F. Scott Fitzgerald. [1]

F. Scott Fitzgerald American novelist and screenwriter

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American fiction writer, whose works helped to illustrate the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age. While he achieved popular success, fame, and fortune in his lifetime, he did not receive much critical acclaim until after his death. Perhaps the most notable member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s, Fitzgerald is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Four collections of his short stories were published, as well as 164 short stories in magazines during his lifetime.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Marilee Lindemann, The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 78
  2. ↑ James Leslie Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life, University of Nebraska Press, 1989, p. 282
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